


Distractions

by ashesandhoney



Series: Jessa In the New Millennium [5]
Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/M, Fluff, POV First Person, Sexual Content, Smut, Vacation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 06:17:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2259108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tessa and Jem on vacation in Venice getting distracted from things they are supposed to be doing. It is set in approximately 2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distractions

We took a bridge across the canal and found a pizza place for lunch before getting lost three times trying to find the hotel that we had booked. By the time 4pm rolled around I was dead on my feet from the jet lag and the hiking but I was happy. Jem stopped to look at everything and we had sat on a fountain in one of the smaller squares and just watched the crowds wander by. Organized tours with sign toting tour guides mingled with families trying to keep an eye on multiple children at once. Locals were easy to pick out, they skirted the crowds and moved deftly through the throngs that stopped in the middle of bridges or in front of glass shops. They didn’t look as surly as New Yorkers faced with the hordes of summer visitors.

“You could unpack my stuff for me,” I told Jem when we had settled into the hotel. I am a warlock and we had opted to leave the luggage and use magic to summon it later. The bags appeared in the room and I’d tossed one on the second bed and flipped it open.

“How much of it is books?” he asked.

“None,” I said.

“Who are you and what did you do with Tessa?” he asked and I looked up from a pair of shoes that I had picked out of the bag because they were more comfortable than what I was wearing. He looked sincerely incredulous. I grabbed the nearest item in the bag and threw it at him in mock annoyance.

“I got a kindle, look at me in the 21st century,” I told him and held up the device and waggled it. I started to say something else but when I looked up he had a bra draped across his shoulder and my comment dissolved into giggles. He looked at me with a smile crawling across his face. He was trying so hard not to laugh but that just made me laugh harder. He looked ridiculous in a blue button down with the bit of lace hanging off of him at an odd angle.

I grabbed another piece of clothing from the bag and threw it too, it was just a t-shirt but this time he retaliated. He is one of those people who seems still and slow, like everything he does is measured and considered.

He is not slow.

I tried to duck out of the way as he launched himself over the bed at me but he caught me around the waist and spun me around. I was laughing again until he backed me into a wall and I could feel his body against mine. My laughter faded into something else as a warmth spread out across my skin. I looked up at him and tried to bite back the smile, sucking my lower lip between my teeth. Pretending to be serious while your body lights up is difficult.

“Why are you throwing lingerie at me?” he asked. His voice was low but the humour was still there. It was like laughter was a current that ran through him all the time if you only listened for it. I knew it wasn’t that simple, that there was darkness there too but I loved this little rumble of laughter so much it hurt a little bit.

“You’re making fun of me,” I told him in a voice that was supposed to be matter of fact but it was far too breathy for that.

“You’re funny,” he said.

“Am I?” I asked.

“You also smell good,” he was even closer now, his breath against my neck and collar bone.

“Liar, I smell like airport and the garlic from that restaurant,” I said.

“Which shouldn’t smell good and yet,” he said pressing his lips against that little hollow behind my ear. I tilted my head back and slid my fingers through his hair to pull him closer.

By the time I remembered that the world was bigger than the space between us, I was drastically late for my meeting with Natasha.

He pulled away from the trail he was kissing down my neck and leaned his forehead against mine so that I was staring into his eyes. My hands had found their way to his shoulders and I slid them up to cup his neck and make sure he didn’t go anywhere. We stood like that for a long moment. Face to face, breath to breath, bodies pressed together but still.

“I keep thinking I’ll get used to you,” he said.

“Used to me?” I repeated.

“Every time you look at me, it’s like a miracle,” he said. “It’s like everything I’ve ever wanted and everything I never thought I’d be able to have. It’s all that every time I see you. When you told that woman on the boat about our honeymoon it was a miracle that you married me. When you decided to come here it was a miracle that you invited me along. When you look at me like that your eyes are a miracle.”

“Funny,” I said in the same low tone he had used, matching my voice to his, “I always thought you were my miracle, not the other way around.”

“That’s why it’s miraculous,” he said, his fingers tracing patterns on my skin.

“We’re abusing that poor word,” I said.

“What should we do instead?” he asked and he shifted his hips against me in a way that made my eyes flutter shut.

“Scrabble?” I said. He looked at me with confusion and then surprise, the word had come out in a tone that couldn’t really be described as anything but erotic and it took him a minute to process what I’d said.

He doubled over laughing and pushed away from me.

“What is scrabble?” he asked.

“A board game, good for vocabulary,” I said.

“You want to play a board game?” he asked grinning at me.

“No, you stupid, beautiful creature,” I said and he gave me a look that was all mock offense but his eyes were dark again and trained on me as I walked toward him. I moved slowly and started on the buttons on my blouse. His eyes tracked my hands and by the time I was standing in front of him with by shirt untucked and falling open his smile had changed again. It was all desire, in every line.

His hands slid into the empty space and around my waist, skin on skin. I found the hem of his t-shirt and pushed it up so that my hands traveled up his stomach as his traced their way up my spine. He let go long enough to let me pull his shirt over his head and toss it onto the floor. Mine joined it before he grabbed me around the waist and picked me up. He spun me around and dropped me back on the bed. I heard the luggage hit the floor and hoped no one was below us to get mad about the impact.

The beds were soft and I sunk back into it under his weight. He settled against me so I was pinned. His hips kept mine in place and I’d spread my knees at some point which had pushed my skirt well up my thighs. It was a vulnerable position that reminded me that he was both bigger and stronger than I was. For all that, I felt nothing so strongly as that I had come home.

He stroked my face and I leaned in to kiss his neck. My lips started on his chest over his heart and his skin was salty from sweating in the sun earlier today. I ran my tongue along his collar bone and kissed the gray mark on the side of his throat, a tiny ritual between us but one we never discussed and never missed.

I grazed my teeth gently on his ear lobe because I knew it always got a reaction. In response he shivered against me and grabbed my face to pull me into a kiss that I felt in my stomach and my finger tips. I could feel him through his clothes as he pressed harder into me. There wasn’t any space but I needed him closer. He’d have to let me up if we were going to get the rest of our clothing off. I pushed against his left shoulder and he caught my meaning immediately. His arms wrapped around my waist to keep me steady and close as he rolled onto his back without breaking the kiss. Our bodies could have entire conversations without ever saying a word.

I sat up on him, readjusting my position so that I was straddling his thighs not his waist. He stopped moving except for his fingers, stroking little patterns against my legs, just above my knees. I undid his belt and pushed the pants lower. His hands were flat against my thighs, invisible to me below my skirt as I sat up enough to push the pants out of the way.

His hands slid to the inside of my thighs as his body moved below me so that my knees were on either side of his stomach and his hands could reach me more easily.

“Stay up, like that,” he said to me when I started to move to close the gap. I felt his hands tighten on the skin between my legs, the same sentence in a language of skin instead of words. I sat up a little straighter but slid my knees a little wider bringing my body closer to his though not quite touching. His hands were in my way, keeping me where he wanted me.

I started to say something to him but it was lost when his thumb brushed against that spot where my thighs met and my head rolled back. I resisted the urge to squirm closer to him, pressure from his hands reminding me what he’d asked for. He was gentle to the point of teasing and when I looked down at him he was smiling at me.

“You make me crazy,” I told him and my voice rasped out as he added just a little more pressure through that little piece of cotton between us.

“I know,” he said. “I’m going to roll you over again.”

The man has a physicality and a sense of how to move that I know comes from years of combat training. Encyclopedic knowledge of hand to hand combat made him fluid in bed. His hips lifted to push me off balance and with one hand hooked under my thigh and another one on my waist, he rolled me onto my back in a single motion. I hit the bed gently but I let out a gasp that had more to do with him than the impact. I had never said it to him but I loved it when he did this, when he took the lead. Dominant but never domineering.

He’d rearranged my knees so that I was laid out below him before I’d sucked in my next breath. I licked my lips and tried to calm my breathing back to a normal speed. He waited until I looked up at him. We stared each other down. His chest was broad, bearing marks and scars of a long, long lifetime across pale skin. His hand on my thigh was a darker colour but had that same strength to it, muscles and scars but he was gentle.

“What are you planning, Carstairs?” I asked.

“All kinds of things,” he said. “Any requests?”

“Anything you want,” I said.

“What if I want to do something horrible?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t do anything horrible to me,” I said and I knew it was true. The smile he gave me sealed it as a promise. His fingers were playing up and down my thighs as he watched me.

“You’re self control is terrifying,” I told him. I felt mine fraying. He was too far away, those fingers weren’t enough. They danced from the little space behind my knee up to the hollow at the top of my thigh but no higher. His smile was a challenge as he shifted and ran a hand up the other leg following the same path.

And my self control was gone. I shifted my hips and tried to slide closer to him as a sound that was best described as wanton moan escaped my mouth. He chuckled and his free hand slid up my stomach to hold me in place. The feel of his hand on my skin didn’t calm me much but it did keep me in place. He wasn’t really holding me, there wasn’t that much pressure and he didn’t have enough leverage to keep me down at this angle if I really wanted to move. It was more of a request that I tried to scrape enough self control back together to honour.

He held me still for a moment longer than I would have liked but he never broke eye contact. Though my breaths were panting and my heart was racing, I stayed. Then that hand on my stomach that was driving me mad by inches moved slowly to my hip and he pulled the skirt and everything below it off. I pushed my hips up to help him get rid of it and then I was naked except for the bra.

His body sliding up mine was like a breath of air after drowning. He lay beside me, a hand still on my inner thigh to keep my knees wide but I could feel his chest down the side of my body and I wrapped my near arm around his neck to pull him in for a kiss that I needed like a body needed air. As his lips touched mine, his fingers slid into me. His mouth swallowed the gasp that escaped from mine and kissed me harder.

My hand on his face. His arm under my back. My bra gone. His mouth lower and lower until I felt the pressure on my breasts as he pulled them into his mouth. There were teeth. His fingers changing rhythm, slowing and becoming less fulfilling, teasing again. I murmured his name. The mouth on my nipples was almost painful and his name became a groan as my hips tried to move with the rhythm that he had abandoned.

“Jem,” I said as he pulled away from me but his hands never left me and when he slid in close again it was face to face, chest to chest, bodies together. He slid into me with a easy motion that made my heart stop and then race.

He gathered me against him and held still. These moments of stillness were something completely unique to him. Even if I hadn’t been completely entranced by him at that moment, I would have given him my full attention as soon as he stilled. We fit. We’d always fit. Not the same but complements. Stronger for being together. This was just the physical expression of that truth.

“I love you so much,” he said to me.

“I know, I love you too, James,” I said.

He kissed me and it was gentle and achingly sweet as he started to move against me. I settled into him and matched each stroke, each gentle rocking pulse that ran through him and into me. After being pinned against the wall earlier, I would have expected quick and powerful but he took his time. I let him lead, I let him set the speed and the intensity grew.

It built slowly but undeniably. When he rolled onto his back without breaking the embrace, I picked up his slow and steady rhythm. His hands playing over my hips and up my back. Holding my face so he could see my eyes or kiss me.

When he sat up under me, I lost my balance and he had to catch me. His hair was rumpled and fell into his eyes when he looked up at me. I sat in his lap and pushed it back from his face. I had memorized every line of that face when we’d been young but I always seemed to find something new hidden there.

His eyes were mischievous as he dropped me onto my back again. My skin slid over the sheets as he pulled me toward the edge of the bed so that one of my knees hung over the edge, the other he pushed up wide. He slid into me this time with that unshakable self control gone. He leaned over me and the position gave him leverage that might have hurt but never quite did. I didn’t realize how close I was until his body came down on mine deeper than I could ever remember him being.

Our lips were together again and the taste of his tongue was in my mouth as my body crested and I gasped out his name, my fingers tightening in his hair. I shuddered against him and around him as he held that too deep thrust in place until my eyes fluttered back open.

“Can I keep going?” he asked and for all the world his voice was shy. My heart expanded or maybe it shattered as I looked into that face.

“Slower?” I said and it came out as a question.

He kept me close as he pulled me back onto the bed and into our first position. My body shuddered around him as he slid back in. I kept my arms wrapped around him and my face buried in his neck as the last shreds of his self control came apart and his body shuddered it’s own release against me from the tips of his toes to flutter of his eyelashes against my cheek. I stroked his face as he relaxed against me. He gathered me against his chest so we were snuggled together, nose to nose. Another one of those long, silent moments of stillness followed as our hearts found their own rhythms again.

“I was supposed to do something,” I said and my voice was dreamy and too soft.

“Scrabble?” he asked.

“I don’t think it was scrabble,” I said.

“Do you think if we tell people we can’t come to things because we’re busy playing scrabble, they’ll believe us?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “They’ll probably assume it’s code for something else.”

“I like the something else,” he said and his lips brushed my cheek.

“Natasha,” I said.

“No, not that something else,” he said.

“I was supposed to meet her at 4:30,” I said. I twisted to see the clock but it was out of my field of vision without getting up and my body wasn’t ready to be even that far away from him.

“You’re late,” he said lifting his head to see the clock behind me.

“Worth it,” I murmured and put my forehead against his and we stayed there a little longer before I tore myself away from him. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually a deleted scene from a longer work that I have finally admitted will not ever be edited back in but I love it to much to just abandon it to my hard drive. 
> 
> It is also the first piece of Jessa smut I ever wrote.


End file.
